I read pretty much anything, from fantasy (City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett) to romance (Bared to You by Sylvia Day) to classics (Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad). The only genres I don't read are self-help and comic books/graphic novels.

12/11 - Nenia Campbell was right, this is preposterous. This is her review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., which most likely is better able to explain the ridiculousness of this book than I ever could.

I've already got a number of pages marked as worth discussing in this review, and that's not counting the ones from the first 40 pages that I didn't bother to mark because they were just small things and didn't seem worth the effort.

On page 51

'An easel held a blank canvas, and beside it all a tall table covered with a dish towel and a pretty blue glass vase held an assortment of high-pigment Lukas paint tubes and dozens of Kolinsky sable brushes in various sizes. None of them used. All of them, as he well knew, top-of-the-line.'

Umm, how does he 'well know'? Was there an explanation about his painting prowess that I missed? Or does he simply 'know' they're 'top-of-the-line' because she's rich and would, of course, buy the best?

On page 53

'She should be 'barricade' in a safe room, not attempting to fix him the most important meal of the day, 'dressed', with deceptive innocence.'

A couple of queries regarding that sentence. First, 'barricaded' instead of 'barricade'. Second, I'm confused by the word 'dressed' in this context. Is Adair saying Mia's dressed in a 'deceptively innocent' way? Or would Cruz rather she wasn't dressed at all? I have no idea.

On page 65

'Mia put her hands behind her, then realised it was the gesture of a three-year-old...'

Why is putting your hands behind your back the gesture of a three-year-old? I think it's a perfect way of making sure you don't get in the way of someone else's cooking (I sure it also works when you need to keep your hands off the hot guy doing the cooking). To be continued...

Later - This is so not the book to use words like 'verisimilitude' and 'propinquity'. I even had to look 'propinquity' up. I guess that's a plus because I learnt a new word, but using such extraordinarily complex (and hard to pronounce) words when it would have been far easier to simply write 'truth' and 'proximity', smacks of an author forcing a reader to admit to their large vocabulary and high intelligence. I'm not impressed by Adair's vocabulary, I'm just irritated by what I see as her shoving it down my throat. To be continued...

Later - So much bad! I think this might actually be getting worse.

On page 97

'Her choppy hair tumbled around her head, parting erotically on her neck.'

What the hell does an erotic hair parting look like?! What a stupid description!

On page 98

'He smelled of fresh air, virile male, and soap.'

God! How does a virile male's smell differ from a non-virile male? Now I can't decide which description is more ridiculous.

On page 101

'The negligee she'd bought from a racy online catalogue was an absolutely plain tube. No ruffles, no embellishments. Just a simple, stretchy, sheer black sleeveless column clinging to every curve and valley, from throat to ankle.'

I don't get the logistics of this negligee. A page and a half after this description Cruz 'moves between her legs', if the negligee is a tube that clings to every curve and valley from throat to ankle I can't see how he can do that while she's still wearing it. It would be too tight (it would probably also be too tight for walking, but she's not actually described as attempting to do that so I won't mention that impossibility) for her to successfully separate her legs without the negligee having been raised above her waist, which clearly hadn't happened as Cruz is described as kissing her through the material. It actually sounds like good exercise for your thighs, like a reverse Thighmaster - wrap your legs in a giant elastic band and then try to open them against the resistance of the material.

On page 106

'Fully clothed, he knelt in the V of her legs.'

That's funny since on page 101 we've already read

'Smile wicked, he straightened and pulled his T-shirt over his head.'

It's the amazing reappearing t-shirt!

On page 109 I decided it was time to start skimming after I read that he'd choked her out while they were having sex, but it was okay because

...he'd known exactly how much pressure to exert on her carotid. More would've killed her. He'd pressed...less. Last-moment decision. She hadn't been hurt.'

Really? It's well documented that a lack of oxygen to the brain is likely to cause, at the very least, a severe headache when she wakes up. That's if she wakes up, because only be a few extra seconds could make the difference between knocking her out and causing permanent damage.

Amazingly I might be finding Cruz's internal monologue more annoying than Ana's. All he seems to say/think is "Can't have more sex with the mark. Have to kill her, in a few days if not sooner. Ooh, I could have killed her just then, but I didn't because I'm so attracted to her, but I can't have sex with her again because I have to kill her. Oopsy daisy, had sex with her again. No more sex frommm......now!", and repeat that over and OVER again. Sooo irritating. The only reason I'm even bothering to keep skimming is that I want to know how he got her profile so wrong and who hired him. To be continued...

15/11 - I've just realised how much I've written on this book, it's not worth a review this long, so this final update will be as short as I can make it while still making my opinion clear. I'm giving this 1.5 stars, rounded down for GR. This wasn't as bad as some of the rubbish Kindle freebies I've gotten from Amazon, that's why it gets an extra half star. There are so many problems with this book, compounded by the fact that it was written by what I consider a pretty popular and well-known romance author who has been writing for many years now. These mistakes were newbie mistakes, but Adair is not a newbie. The plot was not believable, the editing was half a step above 'woeful', both characters were annoying in their own way, and the end was very rushed and tied up way too easily. I can't believe this has such a high rating on GR. Is it just because of all the sex? Yes, it was frequent and creative, but that's not enough to keep a story going. Romance as a genre could be considered a type of fantasy, but there has to be some realism, some believability that these two people would behave the way they do. This book could have an associated drinking game that involves drinking every time she should be dead, the winner would be the one who makes it to the end of the book without losing consciousness.